gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (10/04/84)
At one point I needed something like the ragged-array example that was proposed using new CPP extensions. Being new to the Unix game, rather than extending CPP I wrote a small program which #include-d the original initializer (which was a font description), mashed the data in various ways, then printf'd a replacement #include file for the "real" program to use. Voila! All the power of an enhanced CPP, brought to you by a real live C program! We have the ultimate tool under our fingers (a realo trulo programming language), let's just standardize what we are already using (no wierd ways of catenating strings, no changing the rules for quoted #define expansions, etc -- NO CONVERSION!) and get on with it. Dave Patterson likes to say about his RISC machines: "If adding this feature slows the machine by 10% it had better make the machine use 10% fewer instructions" (paraphrased). I estimate the benefit of "fixing" CPP as low and the cost of converting all the programs that used "outlawed" or "tasteless" CPP features as high.